1. What are the strategic impacts of Walmart’s service design changes?

Guidance: Free two-day shipping with orders over $35 and in-store returns are offered on items purchased from both Walmart and its third-party sellers. These changes provide Walmart customers with a more seamless and uniform retail experience than its competitors like Amazon.

2. What are the supply chain impacts of Walmart’s service design changes?

Guidance: Faster shipping and easier returns will increase the demand for trucking capacity and present a major logistical challenge to Walmart’s supply chain

Toyota’s just-in-time production stands at risk with the looming “hard Brexit” in March 2019.

Last year, the Burnaston plant in the U.K. made nearly 150,000 cars, and 90 percent were sent to EU nations. Normally parts are delivered every 37 minutes but if these parts are held up in Customs in Dover and Calais when Brexit kicks in, production could stop for hours or even months.

Other auto makers express similar concerns and are developing alternatives and contingency plans.

Walmart is experimenting with its policies for online orders involving items that are drop shipped directly from the vendor to the customer. Specifically, it is considering changes to products called “everyday consumables.”

In the past, Walmart would pay for UPS ground shipping to have the item shipped from the vendor directly to customers. However, as the retail giant searches for increased profitability in the fourth quarter, it has dropped this policy on lower-priced items (items with a wholesale price of $28 or less).

Many vendors have seen their items on Walmart’s web site display as “out of stock,” even when these items show as “in-stock” in internal Walmart databases. This has resulted in zeroed sales from the Walmart web site for many vendors with lower-priced items in the everyday consumables category.